Carla Ellis walked along Sunnydale Avenue past the blighted tenements of San Francisco’s largest public housing complex on a recent sunlit afternoon, reflecting on the birds, the grass and the calm around her.

Fifteen years ago, she said, such a peaceful stroll wouldn’t have been possible. Fights, screeching tires and the unmistakable sound of gunfire kept many residents indoors, especially at night. No one dared let their children outside alone, the mother of four said.

“Those days were terrible,” Ellis, 58, said. “People would just keep to themselves.”

But over the past decade, violence in this section of Visitacion Valley south of John McLaren Park — as in many other poverty-stricken areas of San Francisco — has fallen significantly.

Officials say that’s thanks in part to controversial crime-fighting measures known as civil gang injunctions, which resemble restraining orders by arguing that groups of gang members create a neighborhood nuisance.

Now, more than 11 years after City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed the first gang injunction in San Francisco — he would ultimately go after seven groups — city leaders are taking a hard look at the strict program, its effectiveness, and whether such orders may be doing more harm than good in an era of policing that’s focused on building trust with communities.

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“These are people’s lives we are talking about,” said Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer, who has called a June 13 hearing to review gang injunctions at a time when cities such as Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., are scrapping similar programs. “For those who are not engaged in gang activity, it could have a great and profound effect on them and how police treat them.”

The injunctions, which have been used across California, rely on police evidence to identify alleged gang members and bar them from engaging in certain activities in neighborhood “safety zones” — including loitering, interacting with other alleged gang members, wearing certain colors, and in some cases being out after curfew.

Violating an injunction is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail.

Police say the court orders can be valuable tools to improve neighborhoods, and that the people on the lists went on to commit less crime, perhaps because they had to change their lifestyle and their surroundings.

But critics say the program violates people’s civil and due process rights, tarnishes their names, and fosters racial profiling and police harassment. Most of San Francisco’s injunctions surround public housing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and nearly all the listed members are African American or Latino.

Carla Ellis, 58, walks down Sunnydale Avenue while wearing a sweatshirt memorializing her son who was killed by gang violence in Richmond in 2004.

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Jason Jones grew up in the Sunnydale public housing development. In 2010, police and the city attorney’s office listed him as a member of the Down Below Gangsters, though he asserts he was never involved in gang activity.

Jones, now 31, has a wife and three children and lives in the East Bay, where he works nights for a company doing maintenance restoration while his wife works days. Being listed on a gang injunction, he said, “is like a life sentence,” a record easily discovered by an employer conducting a background check.

“We all thought it would go away one day, but here it is years later,” Jones said. “We were just a group of people that grew up there. It’s just crazy.”

City officials said only people with adult criminal convictions are listed on injunctions, and noted that judges must sign off on the order based on evidence presented in a court hearing. Listed defendants can still live and work in a safety zone, but their movements are restricted.

Jones acknowledged that he had been convicted of a crime, and records show he was arrested in a drug-related case in 2006, but he said he was unfairly targeted based on those around him.

“If I had a choice, I would have said, ‘Mom, let’s live somewhere else.’ But I was a kid, a baby,” he said of growing up in Sunnydale. “I couldn’t make those decisions. That was the group of people that were there to be friends with.”

Those named in a San Francisco injunction can fight to be left off the list and can petition the city at any point to opt out by showing documentation they are on a clean path, Herrera said. He has argued for years that San Francisco’s program avoided the flaws seen in some other counties, such as giving street cops the power to add names to the list.

“Our gang injunctions here in San Francisco were handled differently,” Herrera said. “It was a direct result of good interactions between (the) community and the Police Department to build credible cases based on real evidence against individuals.”

But opponents say getting off the list isn’t easy, and that many people don’t bother to try.

Two teens walk home from school through the Sunnydale housing complex in the Visitacion Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“Contesting it is expensive and you have to have a lawyer,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi. “We have tried several times with people, but you have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that you shouldn’t have been on this list in the first place.”

Herrera was met with fierce resistance from Adachi and others when he brought the first of the injunctions against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview-Hunters Point in 2006, before going after six other alleged street gangs in the next four years.

The injunctions are a snapshot in time in a rapidly changing city, and even Herrera agrees many of those on the lists have “aged out” of criminal activity.

Last week, partly in response to the concerns of Fewer and others, Herrera announced he will seek to remove 34 of 42 people named in an injunction against three gangs in the Western Addition and will review the other court orders in Visitacion Valley, Bayview-Hunters Point and the Mission District.

Some community members were pleased with the move. Others didn’t think it went far enough.

“That list was never meant to be indefinite,” said Roberto Alfaro, executive director of the Mission District nonprofit Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth. “The idea was to reduce crime. Well, crime has gone down, so why do we need the list?”

Rows of public housing units are seen surrounded by a manicured lawn in Visitacion Valley.

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

San Francisco recorded about 100 homicides a year when Herrera began filing the injunctions, with many killings coming amid tit-for-tat gang turf wars. Homicides fell sharply from 2008 to 2009, from 98 to 45, though the reasons are difficult to pinpoint. Last year the city saw 56 killings.

“The gang injunctions helped a great deal in San Francisco,” said Tony Ribera, a retired city police chief and director of the International Institute of Criminal Justice at the University of San Francisco. “We were seeing criminal enterprises coming into our communities and taking hold.”

The city attorney’s office said an office review found that, in 2010, almost half of the people named in gang injunctions had not been arrested again — with the exception of arrests for violating the court orders.

Inspector Len Broberg of the Police Department’s Gang Task Force said many members of the Oakdale Mob had not lived in the neighborhood at all. He called them “commuter gangsters.”

“The problem is when you have individuals that don’t live in the neighborhood coming in, standing on the corner and presenting a target,” Broberg said. “Then you have innocent bystanders that end up getting shot.”

Reductions in violence haven’t convinced law enforcement critics that the injunctions are effective. And many say the program is hurting the city’s efforts to heal police-community relations after officers’ fatal shooting of Mario Woods in Bayview-Hunters Point in 2015, which spurred a slate of reforms.

“I don’t think gang injunctions are an appropriate tool for San Francisco,” said Alan Schlosser, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco. “We have to rebuild the trust between communities and police. There’s been a huge breakdown, and one aspect of that is the use of gang injunctions.”

While the legal debate continues, residents like Carla Ellis are more focused on their communities. Three of her children have grown up and moved out of Visitacion Valley, she said, avoiding the trouble that plagued the neighborhood.

Her fourth child, though, was slain in 2004 in Richmond. Terrance Kelly was 18, a standout football player at De La Salle High in Concord who was two days away from moving to the University of Oregon when he was shot by a 15-year-old boy over a perceived slight.

Ellis often wears a sweatshirt with Kelly’s picture on the back and the words “RIP, Love Ya.” Her son is never far from her thoughts on her daily walks in the San Francisco neighborhood where she now feels safe.

“I wouldn’t walk out here if there were still gangs,” she said. “It’s different now. There ain’t nothing out here but the wind.”

Evan Sernoffsky is a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle specializing in criminal justice, crime and breaking news. He’s covered some of the biggest Bay Area news stories in recent memory, including wildfires, mass shootings and criminal justice reform efforts in San Francisco. He has given a voice to victims in some of the region’s biggest tragedies, carefully putting himself in challenging situations to make sure their stories are told. He works out of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice where he keeps watch on the city’s courts and hits the streets to expose the darker side of a city undergoing rapid change. He moved to the Bay Area from Oregon where he grew up and worked as a journalist for several years.